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Diminishing Status of Land Rights of Communities in Dry Lowland Areas and Their Implications: The Case of Ethiopia

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Abstract

Dryland areas occur in both the highlands and the lowlands of Ethiopia and cover over 60 % of the country’s land mass. They support pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities, and their long-standing institutions to manage local resources on a fairly equitable basis. However, this autonomy has been significantly eroded by successive governments’ policy of agricultural expansion and modernization, driven by the growing global demand for food and fuel. By reviewing historical trends and current statuses, this study attempts to identify the driving forces behind this fast-changing land use and its impacts on communities and resources. The review shows that government’s generous land leases to national and global investors, encroachment by smallholder farmers from the highlands, state-initiated settlements of poor households, and individualization of the commons by some community members themselves have further undermined the already weakening customary tenure arrangements (which were never as clearly defined in the lowlands as in the highlands). The problem, however, needs to be seen against the constitutional rights of all citizens who want to be farmers to get land anywhere in the country. Unless these issues are addressed, indigenous communities will continue to be exposed to expropriation and unable to assert their rights in the face of more powerful actors. The chapter concludes by stressing the need to formulate and enact policies and legal frameworks to ensure the livelihoods of dry lowland communities in light of the mounting interests of multiple actors and of other stakeholders’ rights and responsibilities as stipulated in the Ethiopian Constitution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The constitutionally accepted customary land rights are not supported by legal and administrative arrangements for their realization. In fact, the 2005 Land Administration and Land Use Law, Article 5, sub-article 3 reads: ‘Government being the owner of rural land, communal rural land holdings can be changed to private holdings as may be necessary.’ The question here is how it can be possible for the lower law to refute the rights provided in the constitution. The government’s economic rationale of employing what is thought to be ‘open’ land for more ‘productive’ use should not be a point of argument to justify state action. If economic development necessitates expropriations, a regulation that governs such measures through proper compensation should be put in place in the context of pastoralist holdings.

  2. 2.

    Apart from their lack of legal recognition, common pool resources (CPR) , because of their size, present challenges to introducing regulated resource utilizations. Excluding or restricting potential beneficiaries can be challenging because either the sheer size of the CPR makes fencing expensive or traditional norms of equity and customs may make exclusion undesirable (Ostrom 1990; McKean 2000).

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge CIFOR and Wondo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources for covering the staff time of the authors to undertake the study and produce this publication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wondo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources, 128, Wondo Genet, Ethiopia

    Melaku Bekele

  2. Centre for International Forestry Research, Forests and Livelihoods Research Portfolio, Ethiopia Office, 5689, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Habtemariam Kassa

  3. Centre for International Forestry Research, 0113 BOCBD, Bogor, 16000, Indonesia

    Christine Padoch

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Correspondence to Habtemariam Kassa .

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  1. Cali, Colombia

    Purabi Bose

  2. Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Han van Dijk

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Bekele, M., Kassa, H., Padoch, C. (2016). Diminishing Status of Land Rights of Communities in Dry Lowland Areas and Their Implications: The Case of Ethiopia. In: Bose, P., van Dijk, H. (eds) Dryland Forests. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19405-9_2

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